Developer Catchup: POODLE, Tails, Docker, Redis and more

POODLE yips: In what was a glorious nail in the coffin of SSLv3, the POODLE vulnerability(PDF) made sure no one would trust SSLv3 again. The simple fix is to turn off SSLv3 where its used. The bug itself is bad in terms of cryptography, in that it gives an attacker a route to completely decode a stream that has been encrypted, but in practice its not as bad because the attacker has to be a man in the middle to get started. So, using SSLv3 from the open Wi-Fi at the fast food cafe, a bad thing. More worthwhile reading includes Imperial Violet’s explanation and Zmap.io’s guide to disabling SSLv3 in servers.

Chasing Tails: The Tails Live Linux distro, which tries its level best to be an bootable anonymous secure distro, has had an update to Tails 1.2. In the wake of the POODLE hole, it’s switched over to Tor Browser, dropping the IceWeasel, and that change also happens to close its POODLE vulnerability. There’s also Tor and kernel updates and various other minor changes. If you use it, just upgrade.

Docker tightens security: Docker 1.3 has landed, or more accurately Docker Engine 1.3. Highlight is digital signature verification of repositories of images, albeit as a tech preview of the feature. A production option also lets you set SELinux and AppArmor profiles from the command line. Other goodies include the ability to inject a process into a running Docker app so you can wake up a shell when you need to debug something, create and start commands for containers (on top of existing the all in one run command) and most usefully to me at least, shared directories on Mac OS X. The more interesting (as in get the popcorn) move from Docker is its partnering with Microsoft with a long term goal of making Docker run on Windows containers, not just on an a VM with Linux inside. Big challenge there as Microsoft have to basically get cgroups and more onto Windows Server.

Redis Clustered: The Redis key/value cache and store has pushed a release candidate for Redis 3.0.0 out. This is a rather important release as @antirez explains in his blog, it’s the first version with Cluster support, a long in-development feature, which has reached “minimum viable product” level and is stable enough for testing.

Quickies: 6to5 – turns JavaScript ES6 code into plain ES5 code which could be well useful. Asciicinema – lets you record and playback terminal sessions (and could be even better with audio – hint). On the to read list – Building Web Apps with Go – MIT licensed book based around Heroku use but lots of interesting content. And Whiteout Mail has gone open source – it’s all about accessible secure mail and has been in the works since 2013.